A new year begins…

by ncwinters on January 7, 2009

…let’s start off by shelving some of the more useless resolutions.

So every year, much as I don’t want to, I end up making resolutions, or more accurately, deals and demands with myself. ‘If you can do at least this much per day’ or ‘you will do this this year’ or something of the like. Usually lasts about a month or two, then real life takes over and all of the best made plans pretty much turn into crap. Something different this year. Gonna try to focus on doing the best thing at the time and really emphasize taking some of the work out of all my work. In reading various articles on the best ways to manage your time, my problem seems to be (among others) trying to do too much and putting off the little things. Great article by the way, in this months’ Wired magazine about self-help for freelancers, take a look. What I got in essence, was to go ahead and do it now and quit overplanning some of the other stuff.

One of the first ways this will take effect is in this here bloggy-blog. As some of you may know, I currently write and illustrate two comic strips. You may have seen the sporadic postings of reminders for new ones. Here’s one now: Creative License #16 is online today at creattica.com. I’ve also mentioned that I cannot post the new days’ comic on the site, as the respective websites each pay pretty well (we’re talking millions of dollars here) for the comic strips and that one of the stipulations is to keep the content exclusive for awhile. Perfectly resonable, as that’s what helps push traffic and drive people to the site to see the new comics and bascially keep me writing comics. So to publish here, I will start re-posting after a month has gone by to give you good people who do not currently have freelanceswitch.com or creattica.com bookmarked. The comics will be a month old, but you’ll get some freshness in a new (hopefully) laugh. This saves me the trouble of having to do a new post every week about an old comic, thanks to WordPress’ lovely post later function, I can write the post the night I finish the comic and have it post at the appropriate time. More information than you wanted? Probably. To start with, I’ll post the older comics first. Keep in mind, I’m up to #86 on Freelance Freedom so you’ll get an onslaught of those for a while.

So that’s just one of this year’s non-resolutions. Anyone else have any special plans to cut back on the amount of work in order to be more productive?

Enjoy Creative License #1. I’ll post Freelance Freedom #1 shortly. For the first CL I wanted to go with the idea of inspiration. Talking with the site owner, he described creattica as a place for designers to go for daily inspiration, fun and cool distractions. So much of my work is self-referential or literal, I wanted to push the idea of inspiration from random sources in many comics, but so far have only used the idea for the first one. Enjoy.